Studying Unconscious Motivation

The concept of unconscious motivation has long been one central and unique to the psychoanalytic worldview. Psychoanalytic clinicians structure most of their theories and interventions around the notion that behavior is jointly motivated by conscious and unconscious impulses and that awareness of these motivations by analyst and analysand are essential to the treatment process. When hearing about non-analytic psychological or psychiatric theories, an analyst's most frequent response is to inquire about the place of unconscious motivation. If a clinical theory or technique is being critiqued, the implication is that when such a motivation goes unnoticed or unaddressed by treater and patient, change may be fleeting and insufficient. If a metapsychological theory is the object of evaluation, the implication is that a theory that does not take into consideration unconscious motivations will never be able to adequately account for the complexity and nuances of elaborate human behavior, particularly when it involves social interactions (and the corresponding self and other representations). The theories of cognitive neuroscience have always been an easy target in this regard as they have not taken into consideration unconscious motivation, even as they have, in the past several years, begun to include affect, social behavior, and the “cognitive unconscious.” However, this may be about to change.

Unconscious Cognition in Mainstream Scientific Literature

Ruud Custers and Henk Aarts, experimental social psychologists at Utrecht University in Holland, published a review article in the July 2, 2010, issue of Science Magazine entitled “The Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outside of Conscious Awareness.” In it they argue that new evidence from experiments with normal individuals in their own laboratory and in the laboratory of John Bargh at Yale (an invited presenter at the APsaA 2009 National Meeting) supports the notion that humans are regularly influenced by motivation and goals outside of their conscious awareness. Though they use the word “unconscious” to mean “outside of awareness” and not in the more typical psychoanalytic sense of “dynamically unconscious” or actively kept out of awareness, they keep the term “unconscious” and trace the origin of the theory to Freud himself. Interestingly, their objection to Freud's “complex theory” is not that it was too filled with “conflict and drama” (as James Uleman disappointingly suggested in the 2005 book The New Unconscious), but rather that it was “largely unfalsifiable.” Thus the cognitive critique of psychoanalytic theory has moved a great distance from suggesting that it was factually incorrect to one compatible with the conclusions of most psychodynamic researchers, that psychoanalytic theory has moved far beyond what researchers have so far empirically tested.

The findings of experiments on unconscious cognition are unsurprising, and perhaps even disappointing in their scope, to psychoanalytic clinicians, but nonetheless important and foundational to work in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In a first set of experiments, subjects were presented with two conscious but supposedly unrelated tasks, and the first is shown to unconsciously influence their behavior on the second. For example, Bargh and colleagues demonstrated that subjects exposed to words about achievement were more likely to persist and perform well on a later task than those not exposed to those words.

Subjects were seen to respond even to subtle cues in the environment: A leather briefcase left on the desk caused subjects to behave more competitively, a picture of a library on the wall made subjects speak more softly, and the vague scent of a cleaning agent made subjects clean the table more. In each of these a conscious but seemingly unrelated stimulus affected behavior on a later task.

Subliminal Stimuli Affect Motivation

More recent work has established that the subject need not even be conscious of a stimulus for it to influence his or her motivated behavior. Martin Eimer in London, Stanislas Dehaene in Paris, and Hakwan Lau, now at Columbia University, have each published work demonstrating that subliminal stimuli can change motivational patterns, as evidenced both by the resultant behavior and corresponding brain activity. Custers and Aarts took this a step further by demonstrating that subliminal exposure to reward influences the nature of the priming. They asked a group of healthy young adults to squeeze a handgrip and exposed some of them subliminally to words about physical exertion and others to words about physical exertion paired with positive rewards. Subjects primed with both sets of words squeezed the ball harder and longer than those primed with the words about physical exertion alone.

From these experiments, the authors suggest a simple theory for unconscious motivation: When there is “coactivation” consciously or unconsciously of a goal and some reward or positive reinforcement for that goal, motivated behavior is more likely to occur. This has important potential implications for the study of unconscious motivations in relation to psychoanalytic theory and treatment. Who better than analysts to develop a comprehensive taxonomy of unconscious motivations and a set of testable hypotheses about how these motivations influence behavior when activated? Such a tool, if standardized, could be used first to understand the normal range of unconscious motivations and their interactions and then broadened to understand the ways in which these motivations can be problematic in various forms of psychopathology. Perhaps even our taxonomy of psychopathologies could be tied to a set of reliable tests of unconscious motivations and their associated representations of self and other. Finally, we might use assessment of these motivations to measure and ultimately optimize change in response to individual psychotherapeutic techniques. It seems very likely that our colleagues in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience would join us in this project.